Monday, August 17, 2009

solitude and the washerwoman

It is said that St. Petersburg was built on the bones of the builders, the army of serfs that drained the swamps and laid the foundations.

And then, too, as Emerson once said, there was a deal of guano in every immigrant ship that came to America. Buffalo skinners and railroad track men, how many laid down their only homestead and died.

So while we are on the subject, give a thought to the hundreds of thousands of permanently bent spines, the hernias, the paralyzing shoots of rheumatism that rattle around in your clean clothes. Blanchisseuses, Wascherfrau, laundresses, washing woman – from the early modern period to the washing machine of the 50s, this overwhelmingly female job was ill paid, unhealthy, and exhausting. It is, of course, far from over yet. In Mexico City, with its terrible water system, you will not find the American style washer/drier set up as the convenience we all have, and on the rooftops of even rich mansions you might well find the maid soaking clothes in the tub.

Now there is some justice in asking if intellectual history would come unscathed through the judgment of the bones it ignores. And such might be one judgment on solitude as I’ve been construing it. Solitude is a bourgeois affectation – I can hear the voice of the commissar say exactly that, imagine some cloth capped Marxist enforcer from the 30s or 50s pronouncing the very word ‘solditude’ with the utmost contempt.

But contempt has its day, too, its warrant, its reasons. There were armies of washerwomen, and it is a fair question: what would solitude mean to them? To the 167,607 who worked in England and Wales in 1861 (Malcolmson, 7) To the half of free black women who worked as laundresses in Philadelphia in 1840. In France, in the 1870s, there were 90,000 in Paris alone.

Here is what M. Moisy, author of Les Lavoirs de Paris, wrote about the washerwoman:

She has a good heart. A strong yeller, I concur – like the daughter of Mme Angot – she is not less strong in her good sentiments. When an accident, or unemployment strikes one of her neighbors: let a drive be organized in the lavoir: she always gives, even if the charity is to an enemy of yesterday.

She also has the love or her profession, more than other workers of any other profession, and it is tough, this job: the laundry worker begins at six in the morning, only takes an hour off to eat, and works until eight or eight thirty in the evening, around thirteen to fourteen hours a day.

Returned home, wet down to her bones, she has to prepare the soup for her husband and kids, and doesn’t get to sleep until she has done her housework.

The next day should puts on her humid rags to begin the day’s rude existence all over again.” (Barbaret I: 271 – my translation)

Such numbers of women force an image upon the collective mind. It is a little unsettling that the image of the washing woman in the 18th and 19th century corresponds so well to national stereotypes. In Germany and Austria, there was the hetera washerwoman, the Alte Wascherfrau, who had her place in Volkslied and Grimm’s tales, and even casts a shadow in Kafka’s The Trial. In France, from Jean Vadé’s 1740 comic Parisian dialect novel, Lettres de la Grenouillère to Balzac’s La Rabouilleuse, the blanchisseuse was renowned for her freedom, for her constant presence on Parisian streets, and, of course, for her erotic charm – a charm that wished away the wet rags of Moisy’s description. Balzac’s men, his mature men, ass men, cannot resist her. And in England? England, that frightening, puzzling place. Unlike the cook and the chambermaid, who at least get some bawdy attention from 18th century writers and printmakers, and of course get orders in respectable 19th century households, there is something like a negative space, as though the laundress really was a pariah. Which is not true, of course, about Ireland – the old washerwomen in Yeats, and the voices of them in Finnegan’s Wake, are taken from life – that is where the authentic circus animals come from. In America, as we have mentioned, race has everything to do with cleaning clothes.

LI, this fascinating post has me thinking of what exactly the washerwomen clean, even if of course it seems pretty obvious - they clean clothes, garments, remove the dirt, the stains, the traces...but is the obvious ever that obvious when it is a matter of washing off and away traces, etc.?What is the place of washerwomen in the history of the propre, a proper history? ( Propre also means clean, as you know.) A clean history, history washed clean. A history for which clean/unclean matters, it might even be in no little part the history of such.

Why do the washerwomen have an erotic charge in this history, they clean but are they unclean? Something of blood, something of a rhythm that might just be an other history that opens up?

Amie, I've written half a post this afternoon that I hope opens up some of those questions. The voice of the commissar - even though there is an ugly history there - begins with a truth - those humid rags, those long days, those meals, those bloated legs, often in water half the day, that bending. It is partly because of washerwomen that I cannot, and will not, write a total history, a history of happiness as the advent of something bad, even if my plea is against the total social fact and its incoherences and reaching into a thousand, a million routines.

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.